


Forgotten, But Not Gone

by SapphicScholar



Series: Sanvers Amnesia Fix-It Fic Series [1]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, F/F, Maggie's POV, Memory Loss, Not A Happy Ending, but also not unhappy, but it won't be in this fic, let's call it ambiguous, no but really it's angsty af, pretty canon compliant, sanvers in a way, to be clear bc i've already gotten questions: there is a possibility for a happy part 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-03-11
Packaged: 2019-03-24 12:24:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13811130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SapphicScholar/pseuds/SapphicScholar
Summary: “Alex has no memory of the attack, nor of Reign or really much of the past couple of months,” J’onn explained.“And?”Eliza turned to face Maggie. “And she’s asking for you, Maggie. She’s asking for her fiancée.”Or the one where Alex loses her memory and wakes up thinking she and Maggie are still together.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Alright, I've never written anything quite so angsty, but my fiancée asked for angst and amnesia, then along came this prompt on Twitter, and here we are. I hope you...is enjoy the right word with angst? Who knows! I'm a little nervous about posting tbh. 
> 
> The first two chapters are short, and then we jump to long chapters from there on out. Most of the fic is already written (and it's completely plotted out), so it'll be posted on a regular basis until it's done (I'm thinking about 6 or 7 chapters over 2-3 weeks)

“Turn off your phone!” a voice yelled from behind Maggie in the movie theater, and she scrambled to find it and click off the volume. She’d never wanted to be one of those people, yet here she was: that asshole sitting in a crowded theater with her phone’s ringtone blaring, not muffled in the slightest by her seat or the bag. And god, it was for a random number too, not even the precinct. It wasn’t like she could do the whole, “I’m a cop! It’s an emergency!” and run out looking like someone who mattered.

Really, the whole incident seemed like a summation of her life these days: one shitshow after another. She didn’t even care that much about the movie; it had just seemed like a good way to get out of her shitty new apartment for a few hours to distract from the reality of everything that had happened. New apartment. She hated that phrase. It sounded like something she chose. Like how once upon a time National City was her “new home” because she’d chosen to leave Gotham. Only this time she hadn’t been the one to make a choice at all. Alex had. Alex had decided that her earlier promises about Maggie’s being everything she needed didn’t actually hold true, that Maggie wasn’t enough for her, just like she’d never been enough for anyone to want to keep her around. And so now Maggie had a “new apartment” far from the precinct with water stains on her ceiling and rats in the stairwell and a cheap mattress she’d gotten at IKEA that felt like sleeping on a pile of old yellow phonebooks. It made her long for the days of dormrooms and regulation furniture. At least then she had someone to call about the rats.

When she looked back up at the screen, she realized she had no idea what was going on. Two people were kissing, and she only recognized one of them. After a few more minutes of confusing dialogue, she got up and left. It wasn’t like the wasted twelve bucks for her ticket really compared to the wasted thousands of dollars on wedding shit that she’d let Alex, well, okay, probably Eliza, convince her mattered. Because it had mattered to Alex, and Alex had mattered to her. She would’ve been happy enough to go down to the courthouse and get married—it wasn’t like she had family or even many friends coming out for her. The handful of friends she was still close with would understand. They’d make it down to whatever casual celebration Maggie eventually threw. Really, she’d wanted to have a party on the beach—just get the people closest to them to come out and have a bonfire and some drinks and good food and celebrate being alive and together and happy. Even after all these years, Alex still loved the beach, and Maggie loved things that made Alex look light and happy, like the cares and stresses of her job and her day-to-day life could finally fade to the background. But after everything that went wrong, didn't everyone sort of want the biggest, gayest wedding National City had ever seen? Maggie couldn’t say no. And, she thought, with Alex by her side, she might just have been able to want that too, even if her side of the wedding would be quite a bit smaller than Alex’s, filled out as hers would by her family and all their friends. The same friends she saw still hanging out with Alex at the alien bar—the bar that had once been a space where she felt comfortable. She stopped going. It wasn’t the same after M’gann left anyway.

As she wandered the blocks around the theater, Maggie checked her phone, finding a voicemail from the unknown number. Furrowing her brow, she typed in her password and held the phone up to her ear.

“Ms. Sawyer? This is Nurse Roberts at National City General. I’m calling because Ms. Danvers was in an accident and is in the ICU, and this is the number she had listed as her emergency contact.”

Maggie hung up before the nurse had even finished her message. She was in a cab before she was quite conscious of having hailed one. In what felt like mere seconds, she found her feet propelling her toward the front doors of the hospital she knew too well from seeing crime scene victims rushed here after terrible accidents.

“Can I help you, ma’am?”

Maggie blinked slowly, as if just now realizing that she had made it all the way up to the ICU. “I, uh, I’m her emergency contact.”

The woman arched an eyebrow at her. “Whose emergency contact?”

“Alex. Alex Danvers.” The words felt heavy in her mouth, and nothing seemed like it was quite real.

“ID?”

Maggie passed over her badge, figuring it worked as well as anything else.

“She’s in room 311. Can you follow the signs alright?”

“What happened?”

The nurse’s frustration seemed to give way into pity then. “I don’t know, dear. Her nurses and doctors will be able to tell you more.”

Maggie nodded mutely before wandering down the corridor. Everything seemed different, like she was getting all the sensory inputs but not in a way that made sense anymore. She heard herself speaking and responding, but the voice didn’t sound like her own, and her body seemed to move independently, as if it still knew what to do even when she no longer did.

“Ma’am. Ma’am!” a voice yelled as if from underwater.

“Yeah?”

“You can’t go in there,” the nurse explained, stepping in front of Maggie.

“I’m her emergency contact.”

“Ah, Ms. Sawyer?” he asked.

“That’s me.”

“Alex is currently being examined by her doctor, but you’ll be able to see her in a few minutes.”

“Okay.”

“Do you want a seat? I can drag a chair into the hallway for you.”

“What happened to her?” Maggie asked once more.

“No one told you?”

Maggie was surprised to find that the urge to snap and yell wasn’t as strong as she expected it would be in a situation like this. There had been a few times when Alex had gotten injured at the DEO or when she’d been late home from a dangerous mission. Somehow this felt different. Maybe it was because she genuinely knew nothing this time. How could she be mad when she needed whatever scraps of information she could salvage from these people? “No,” she answered simply.

“She suffered severe trauma to the head.”

“Is she…”

“She’s in a coma right now. We…people do wake up, though.”

“Right.”

Maggie slumped down to the floor of the hallway, ignoring the nurse’s offers to get her a chair. Eventually the doctor came out and said more words to her. They were all similar. Coma. And traumatic brain injury. And blunt force. Then he told her she could go in.

It wasn’t how she’d expected to see Alex for the first time in months. She’d caught glimpses of her at crime scenes, and then the one time out at the bar, but she hadn’t seen her like this. Well, she’d never seen her like this. Now Alex’s face was mottled with deep bruises. A line of stitches ran across her skull and through her hair, and there was still some matted blood that the sponge bath Maggie assumed she probably got hadn’t taken care of. She wondered how much earlier Alex had gotten hurt. She wondered why she hadn’t been called then. Then again, if it was urgent enough that she was rushed into surgery without identification…she didn’t want to think about what any of it meant.

She sat still in the chair until the doctor came in again to check Alex’s vitals. It was a new doctor this time—a woman with graying hair and shallow wrinkles around her eyes. She introduced herself, and Maggie managed the most basic of pleasantries. She didn’t seem to expect anything more from Maggie.

One of the overnight nurses brought Maggie a blanket and a pillow at some point and showed her how to use the recliner in case she wanted to sleep. Maggie reclined the chair back and covered herself with the blanket and stared up at the tiled ceiling. There were watermarks on this one too.


	2. Chapter 2

The next morning, someone brought Maggie a bit of food and explained that in the future, she should try to get to the cafeteria during breakfast hours. She didn’t realize breakfast hours would have ended yet. She called her captain and took a personal day.

Sometime after the nurse with food but before the next round with the doctors, there was a loud commotion from the hallway. “She should never have been brought here in the first place!” The voice was familiar, but Maggie wasn’t quite sure about much of anything these days.

“Sir, we will call security!”

“She is to be transferred back to me. We have the resources to care for her.”

“Sir, we are a hospital, and she needs medical professionals. I’m sure you mean well, but she is exactly where she needs to be, and if you don’t want me to call security…”

“She would want me to make these decisions.” Now she knew the voice.

“She has an emergency contact who is here, and if decisions need to be made, that will be the person we consult.”

“Who?” J’onn roared.

Maggie dragged herself over to the doorway. “Me.” Her voice was raspy from lack of sleep and water, and she was fairly certain she looked more like death than half of the patients in the hallway. She wouldn’t let herself make any medical decisions for another person either.

“Mag—Detective Sawyer. I didn’t realize…”

“It’s fine. I didn’t either.” She really looked at him then, taking in the deep cuts that ran across one side of his face and along his arms. She wondered what the hell had gotten to them, though at least now she had reasonable answers for why Alex wasn’t taken straight to the DEO.

“Are you okay, Ms. Sawyer?” the nurse from the day before asked.

“Fine,” she shrugged.

“She should really be transferred back to us.”

“Was what hurt her”—Maggie looked around for anyone in their general vicinity—“alien in nature?”

“She was hurt by an alien.”

“But was it…they told me it was trauma to the head.”

“It was,” J’onn conceded.

“Then she should stay here.”

“We are at least as equipped to handle traumatic brain injuries as the hospital is.”

“Maybe. But the doctors said that moving her is dangerous in her condition, and I won’t see her put at risk just so that you can have her closer to you.”

J’onn gritted his teeth, but he seemed to be able to tell that Maggie wasn’t about to change her mind. “I’m going to have one of our doctors come by to do an assessment as well.”

“I won’t stop you.”

J’onn nodded, finally looking in and over at Alex. Maggie watched the subtle transformation that seemed to overtake him as his shoulders slumped and the muscles of his jaw tightened. “Is she…?”

“I don’t know.”

“This never should have happened.”

“No, no, it probably shouldn’t have.”

They stood in silence together, both of them looking over at Alex. After a few minutes, J’onn cleared his throat. “Are you”—he paused as if stumbling for the right words—“alright?”

“No.” There was no use lying to the man who could read minds, and Maggie was too exhausted to put on the usual show.

“So you’re still her—”

“Guess so. I assume Kara will make sure Alex changes that when she wakes up.” Neither of them pointed out that the “when” should really be an “if.”

“I need to get back. We, uh, we lost a lot of people the other day.” In response to Maggie’s head tilt, he added by way of explanation: “Reign.”

“Shit. I’m sorry.”

“Kara’s still under the sunlamps.”

Maggie wasn’t sure why J’onn was still telling her these things, as if any of the people involved would want her to know. It wasn’t like they’d ever find out if something had happened to her.

“Would it be alright with you if I came back tonight?”

“That’s fine.” It was in that moment that the reality of it all hit her; she was Alex’s guardian now, the one who got to decide who saw her and who didn’t, and that would mean coming face to face with all the people who were meant to be her family, the same ones she hadn’t seen since…

The second J’onn left, Maggie slumped back into the recliner. She didn’t move again until the doctors—both National City General’s and the DEO’s—came back to check on Alex. She didn’t leave the room completely until dinner time when someone finally came and suggested that she really needed to eat something, that otherwise she wouldn’t be up to making medical decisions for her partner—and god, she wanted to cry and break things and curl up into herself when he said it. Instead she forced herself into the elevator and down to the basement level where the signs said the cafeteria was located. It smelled like her middle school cafeteria if it had been doused in industrial cleaner and then mixed in with that unique brand of hospital smell that always left her stomach churning. But she forced herself to get a protein bar that she chewed without tasting it until there was nothing left but a shiny wrapper.

The next day, Eliza showed up, her features drawn tight and her lips pinched together as she fought to stay strong even as she watched both of her young daughters fight for their lives, and Maggie excused herself with an apologetic smile that she knew looked anything but happy. But she couldn’t. Not now. Not ever. She knew Eliza had sent her a card after everything that had happened with Alex, but she’d never opened it. She’d already lost one mother; losing another just seemed like rubbing salt in the wound.

The next few days were much of the same, only now she made her way into the precinct from 9-5 most days, leaving Eliza plenty of time alone with Alex. She seemed to understand when Maggie bolted from the room each time she arrived, and she was quick to establish a pattern of leaving promptly at 5:30 each day to go sit by Kara’s side in the DEO, ensuring Maggie had time alone with Alex. Maggie’s captain—one of the more decent guys on the force—happily granted her “family friendly medical leave” for the other hours she had been scheduled to work, even though he knew as well as everyone else that the wedding was no more. But loyalty ran deep, and he wouldn’t fault her for honoring that bond.

Even in the fallout from all the chaos and destruction, J’onn still came by for an hour or two every evening once Eliza took her place by Kara’s side at the DEO’s medbay. He never said anything, but sometimes he held Alex’s hand and closed his eyes and looked as close to tears as Maggie had ever seen him.

On Friday, Kara made her way in, looking frantic but healed, whole, almost as if the whole incident had never happened. Maggie suspected that the discrepancy was eating away at her, and she stepped out to give her privacy with her sister.

On Saturday, James came by with Winn. James had crutches and a large brace around his knee—she could only assume that Guardian had also tried to step in when Reign attacked, but she didn’t want to ask, especially not when the whole attack was still being kept quiet. They both greeted her with grim smiles before turning their attention to Alex. Neither one of them seemed to think Alex would want them to see her that way, and they left soon after, dropping off cards and asking Maggie to let them know when Alex woke up.

Over the course of long nights with frequent visits from doctors and nurses to check in on Alex, Maggie learned to sleep with the lights on and her iPod playing. For the rare few times when she didn’t bolt from the room when new people arrived, she learned to drown out the sounds of Alex’s other visitors with music. Idly, she wondered whether she might give herself an ear infection this way, but maybe it was just all the time in the hospital making her paranoid. The whole situation had a way of giving new significance to old songs that made Maggie feel silly and childish, especially the handful of times she’d ended up sniffling alone in that damn faux-leather recliner, staring up at the water spots that seemed to taunt her.

By far, the worst had been the night she was just barely drifting off to sleep when familiar chords strummed through her headphones. Too groggy to react as quickly as she normally would, Maggie was left gasping for air at the opening line: “ _Sweetheart, would you wake up today?_ ” She swore she’d deleted the song. She couldn’t bear to hear it anymore—not after everything, not after coming back to Alex packing away everything that was supposed to be for their wedding, the stupid fucking poignant song that should never have meant as much as it did playing from the shitty iPhone speaker she normally only used for cooking and cleaning around the house. But there it was again, coming up on shuffle as if to remind her that she couldn’t escape from a single moment of that nightmare. It was the only night Maggie left Alex’s side, bolted from the hospital and cried herself to sleep curled up alone on her shitty IKEA mattress, a quiet prayer to a god she wasn’t quite sure she believed in on her lips, a plea for Alex to just wake up.

The next week, Alex grabbed her hand, and Maggie nearly flew out of her chair in her hurry to call the doctor. She knew, of course, that twitching and blinking and even vocalization and movement didn’t mean Alex was waking up, but she couldn’t help but hope. The whole time the doctors examined Alex, she paced the hallways. If Alex did wake up, she wondered about the proper protocol. She suspected she should probably leave before she really came to. No need to make things worse when Alex would already feel like shit. She’d wait in the hallway long enough to make sure she got the all clear, then she’d head out and go back to her new apartment and throw herself back into work and go on living her life as though this interruption, much like their relationship and engagement, hadn’t turned her life inside out.

It turned out to be a false alarm. As did the next three times. The fifth time was, apparently, quite real. Maggie was shuffled out of the room as doctors took over. She sent a message to J’onn and asked him to let Kara and Eliza know; she couldn’t bring herself to make those calls herself. Once the others showed up, Maggie slipped away to the cafeteria, figuring she would walk past the room one last time to make sure Alex was alright before she left for good a second time.

\---

Four days later, Maggie got a voicemail from J’onn. “We really need you back at the hospital.”

After clearing it with her captain, Maggie forced herself to traverse the now overly familiar path from the precinct to National City General. She walked back to room 311, where she found Eliza and Kara and J’onn—exactly the people she didn’t want to see—standing outside Alex’s room.

“What’s wrong?”

“She’s actually doing remarkably well,” Eliza answered. “I mean, I don’t like the term miraculous, but…she was lucky.”

“So I’m here because…?”

“Well, she, uh, certain things can apparently happen with head injuries, like memory loss. And apparently trauma—non-physical trauma—can increase those odds,” Kara cut in, looking like she was trying to soften the blow.

“Okay…”

“Alex has no memory of the attack, nor of Reign or really much of the past couple of months,” J’onn explained.

“And?”

Eliza turned to face Maggie. “And she’s asking for you, Maggie. She’s asking for her fiancée.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who didn't care to go watch/rewatch 3x05 (don't blame ya), the song Maggie refers to is the one that was on while she and Alex were packing up the rest of Maggie's things before Maggie changes the music: Luke Sital-Singh's Killing Me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHFuEHRfVac (in case you want to hear it - I'll tell you now, it's a real downer of a song) 
> 
> See you on Sunday with a chapter that's double the length of 1 and 2 combined!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now that we’ve been eased into the angst, here’s a long chapter. Also, uh, it’s totally the first bit of the fic that made my fiancée (who requested it, mind you) cry when I was reading it to her, so…
> 
> Also, I've completely finished writing the fic, so it's just a question of spacing it out (likely Tuesday, Thursday, then Sunday again)

After several deep breaths, Maggie opened her eyes once more. “Excuse me?”

“She has retrograde amnesia,” Eliza said, her voice soft and even—the way Maggie thought it would be if she had been a medical doctor and spent her days talking to patients and their grieving families. “They think, well, they’re not certain, but the damage to the hippocampus doesn’t seem extensive, so she should be able to recover her memories with time and patience and exposure to certain parts of her old life.” Maggie nodded slowly, trying to take it all in. “But they also think there might be a part of her that’s psychically protecting her from things that happened during that period.”

“What…what does that mean?”

J’onn stepped forward when it looked like Eliza was on the verge of tears. “She watched her sister be badly beaten, nearly killed, more than once. She watched friends and coworkers be killed or return from battle horribly injured. She nearly died herself. She lost the life she thought she had.” Maggie bit her tongue; now wasn’t the time to play the blame game. “Her body may realize that now isn’t the best time to relive all of that trauma, not while it’s still healing.”

“So what? I’m supposed to go in there and hold her hand and tell her it’ll all be just fine?”

“The doctors say that she should be kept happy and comfortable while her brain and body heal. She should be able to go back to her old way of life with as little disruption as possible.”

“And that means…?”

“That means life with you.”

Maggie shook her head. “You’ve got to be fucking with me.”

“It’s not permanent,” J’onn insisted, stepping to the side with Maggie. “It would be, hopefully, for no more than a few weeks.”

“But for a few weeks I’m supposed to go live with the woman who, let’s not forget, broke up with me, and play happy home with her until she remembers that I wasn’t enough for her and sends me on my merry way again?”

J’onn grimaced. “It’s not ideal.”

With a bark of a laugh, Maggie shook her head. “Understatement of the century. Or, you’re older—millennium, maybe?”

“Maggie,” J’onn sighed. “I know that I have no right to ask you to do any of this. I get it. But I also know that you didn’t leave that woman’s side for days. I know that even after everyone else showed up, you were still here more than all of us. I know that you want what is best for her health, no matter what your personal feelings about her choices are. And right now, what’s best for her is making sure that she goes back to her old routine, gets a sense of stability in her life.”

“And you don’t think it’s gonna fuck her up when she finds out that the stable life she’s being given is a big lie?”

J’onn shrugged and gave Maggie a small smile. “I don’t know, but it’s all we’ve got.”

\---

“Maggie,” Alex managed, her voice raspy from far, far too many days of disuse and lack of water. Her lips were pale and cracked, but they still curved up into a genuine smile at the sight of Maggie hovering in the doorway. She looked better than she had the last time Maggie had been in the room. Maggie guessed the doctors had probably gotten her to start eating and begin physical therapy. Though, knowing Alex, she was probably the one that demanded that she be allowed to start physical therapy, unwilling to remain in bed any longer when every minute seemed to be making her less and less physically equipped to do her job, to protect Kara.

Forcing herself to inhale, to breathe, to stay standing, Maggie stepped forward once, then a second time, then a third, until she was nearly over to the bed, though not quite close enough for Alex to reach out and touch her. She didn’t think she’d survive it. “I’m glad you’re awake.” And that, at least, was true. The long days and longer nights of uncertainty had almost killed her.

“You were here.”

“Hmm?”

“They said I was in a coma. For a while. But you were here, I know it.”

“I…yeah, yeah, I was.” With all the time she had spent in the hospital these past weeks listening to talk of injuries and illnesses, Maggie knew it wasn’t physically possible for a heart to break, but she swore it felt like everything in her chest was collapsing in and tearing itself apart at the sight of Alex beaming up at her.

“Where were you? After I woke up?”

“Oh.” Maggie let out a shuddering exhale. “I…we had…the doctors needed time to work with you alone.”

“But after that. My mom was here. And Kara and J’onn.”

J’onn’s words about the importance of stability rang in her ears, and Maggie bit back the urge to tell Alex that she left because the Alex with all of her memories would so clearly not have wanted to see her, that she ran because things between them weren’t exactly good, no matter how much she understood the idea of “irreconcilable differences” in a relationship. “We had an emergency at the precinct. I thought it would be better for your family to be here.”

“But you—you are my family.”

Tears burned at the corners of her eyes and she tried to swallow her emotions, choking back all the accusations on the tip of her tongue, things like, “We were supposed to be family,” or, “I was okay losing my family for a second time because I thought I had a whole new chosen one,” or, “You promised I was all that you needed too, until suddenly I wasn’t enough.”

“Hey, it’s okay,” Alex reassured Maggie. “I’m awake, and you’re here now, and that’s all that matters.”

“Right,” Maggie managed, her voice tight and unlike anything she’d heard before.

“Ms. Sawyer?”

Maggie looked up and found the same doctor from the first night with the graying hair standing next to her. “Yes?”

“We should really go over what you need to know about caring for Alex.”

“Caring…caring for Alex.” She swore she could physically feel her brain piecing together everything.

“When she’s released from the ICU.”

“Because she’ll be coming with me,” Maggie said slowly, as though she were just now testing the words. Somehow, between all of the things J’onn had said, the reality of having to go back to the apartment they’d once shared together was only now hitting her.

“Uh, I was told you two shared an apartment. Is that not the case?” The doctor looked between the two women in confusion.

“Oh god,” Alex gasped. Maggie grimaced, wondering if she had already ruined everything again. “Did I forget? Did we end up buying that house?”

No, no, this was so much worse than if all of Alex’s memories had come rushing back at once, Maggie decided. She remembered the long motorcycle ride they’d gone on out to the outskirts of the city just a few weeks after they’d gotten engaged. On their way home, they’d driven past an open house sign decorated with large, colorful balloons, and on a whim, they’d pulled into the neighborhood, parking their bikes side-by-side outside a little two-story house with a fenced-in backyard that they’d agreed would be perfect for Gertrude, a name Maggie found she’d gotten used to with enough time and exposure (though she still made Alex swear she could name their second dog). She’d felt beyond out of place in their leather jackets, bike helmets tucked under their arms, mingling with the realtor and so many clean-cut, straight couples, but Alex had made her comfortable, had squeezed her hand and whispered silly questions to her like: “How many dogs do you think could comfortably live in that second bedroom?” and “Do you think this fridge is big enough for all of Kara’s leftovers, or should we get a spare one for the basement?” and “How long do you think it’ll take for us to christen each and every new room in this house?”

Clearing her throat, Maggie shook her head. “No, we, uh, we decided to wait.”

“Ah, probably for the best,” Alex admitted. “I know you have a soft spot for brick.”

It was such a small, stupid detail, but suddenly Maggie was crying, and she hated it—hated anyone seeing her like this, especially strangers, but most of all in that moment she hated that it was all because of one dumb memory conjured up by this gorgeous fucking woman who had slowly but surely chipped away at the walls she’d built up so high around her heart ever since she was 14-years old and turned away by the family that was supposed to love her unconditionally and spat at by her first best friend, her first real crush. Because all Alex’s patience and love had left her open and vulnerable and, for the first time in years, surrounded by a family so much bigger than the one or two people she’d let in over time. And then in an instant it was gone again, and she swore it felt like her heart was being forcibly ripped out of her chest, and this time being alone wasn’t just more of the same; now it was a change, and god, she felt so utterly alone.

The doctor followed her out into the hallway, stepping far enough away from Alex’s room that she wouldn’t be able to hear. “I understand how hard it can be to see a loved one like that,” she said, her tone gentle and reassuring and all the things doctors were supposed to learn how to be, according to some op-ed Maggie had read in the paper as she sat alone with her breakfast at the wobbly excuse for a table she’d picked up from some guy on Craigslist while too much coffee for one person alone to drink brewed behind her.

“It’s not—we’re not—she’s not a loved one anymore.” That wasn’t quite true. She almost hated Alex precisely because she still loved her, still loved her in a way that she felt way down deep in her bones, like this feeling that had become a part of her all the way down at the cellular level, like her whole body still looked for Alex when she showed up places and reached out for her during long nights spent alone.

“Oh?”

“I though”—Maggie took a deep breath, willing the tears to stop falling and her lungs to fill with oxygen all the way—“I thought they’d already told you. She doesn’t remember, but she br—we broke up, called off the engagement, all that shit.”

“I’m so sorry, I haven’t seen her since the first day or two after she woke up when she was completely disoriented and barely able to speak, let alone tell us what she knew. I just thought—when you were there every day…”

“I’m still, uh, I guess she never changed her emergency forms.”

The doctor nodded slowly. “Well, you are certainly under no obligation to stay here; we can have any of her forms that authorize you to make medical decisions for her changed, and you’ll be able to go about your life.”

Maggie let out a derisive snort of laughter. “I wish it were that easy. No, apparently it’s bad to retraumatize patients. Apparently it’s for the best if I let her believe that we’re still together until she’s strong and healthy enough for her to remember all the reasons I wasn’t good enough and go on with her life once more.” Realizing she’d likely said too much, Maggie waved her hand. “Sorry, no, it’s fine. It was just…a lot. I’m fine. Yes, we’ll be going back to her apartment together. Yes, I’ll be taking care of her. So if you have papers or instructions on what I should be doing, by all means, hit me.” The last few words came out as more of a growl than Maggie had intended, but the doctor still pulled out a folder with pages and pages of information about signs to watch out for and ways to help patients recover memories if they had gaps. There were all sorts of warnings about moodiness and anger and confusion and violent outbursts. She had to be calm and patient and caring and all the things that felt utterly antithetical to the way she felt because she was hurt and devastated and torn apart.

“Does that make sense?” the doctor asked.

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, I guess so.”

“We’ll still keep her here for at least a few more days for observation and continued physical therapy. She seems to be doing quite well, all things considered, but the trauma was not insignificant.”

“Right, right.” Maggie looked down at the packets of papers in her hand again. “Could you, uh, could you tell her that I had to go back to work? I’ll be back later.”

As soon as the doctor nodded, Maggie was already turning on her heels and bolting for the door.

\---

When she came back that evening, no one mentioned that she reeked of scotch, but Kara led her down to the cafeteria and forced her to drink water and eat a slice of pizza that felt like it had been cooked in a microwave then left out for hours under a barely functional heating lamp for maximum rubbery texture potential. She sat with Maggie while she ate without trying to force a conversation and squeezed Maggie’s hand as they rounded the corner to Alex’s room, whispering, “Thank you,” before they were close enough for Alex to hear them.

“Can we just—just stop!” Alex yelled, rubbing at her head and glaring at Eliza.

“Of course, we can always take a break,” Eliza said as she lowered the memory drills the doctor had given her to practice with Alex.

Maggie cleared her throat from the doorway and watched as Alex’s gaze snapped up to her, a smile suddenly forming. “Hey. I missed you.”

“Yeah, sorry, I, uh, work. You know how it is.” She rubbed awkwardly at the back of her neck and tried not to think about how similar the lying felt to the last year of her relationship with Emily, back when she’d been miserable and desperate for time away, even if it was just voluntary overtime at the precinct or hours spent in some miserable little shithole of a bar with people that didn’t know—or care to know—her.

“I’m glad you’re here now,” Alex whispered.

Maggie forced herself to nod and sank down into the chair farthest away from Alex.

“They said, um, they said tomorrow is the weekend. So will you—do you have the day off?”

“Oh, er…” Maggie paused, trying to find a way to get out of spending all of her waking hours around Alex and the family she almost had.

“Is it…is it not Friday?” Alex asked, and Maggie hated the way her voice broke, thinking back to the packets she had read through at the bar, about all the warnings about how TBI patients might struggle with short term memory loss and the way it could frustrate them.

“No! It is. Let me, uh, let me call my captain and ask, okay?” The small smile she got in return reminded Maggie of their first few dates out together, back when Alex had been so nervous about asking for things, about demanding too much from her, from their fragile new relationship. “I’m sure he’ll understand.”

She sat in the room until everyone else had left—Kara and J’onn for a “developing situation” and Eliza for sleep, having been there since Alex first woke up.

“Do you, um, do you want to come up a little closer?” Alex offered, gesturing at the recliner that Maggie was fairly certain had the shape of her ass permanently imprinted in it.

“Sure,” she agreed, even as her brain screamed out, “Absolutely not.”

After a few minutes, Alex began speaking again. “It’s, um, I don’t like this—not knowing things that I used to know.”

“Hey, they said those memories will come back with time. And they gave me a whole list of things that are good for helping people to remember, so when we go back to yo—our apartment, we’ll try some photos and stories and things, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You should try to get some sleep. It’ll help you to heal.”

“I just slept for over a week,” Alex joked, and Maggie couldn’t help but smile and shake her head.

“Let’s do some less deadly sleeping this time. Deal?”

“I suppose.” Alex lowered her bed back down from sitting and tried to find a slightly less uncomfortable position, while Maggie switched off the lights, figuring she’d wait until Alex fell asleep to leave. After a few minutes with only the hum of machines, Alex’s voice broke through the quiet. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“No, I…I want to. You, your being here—you make me feel safe, Maggie.”

“You are safe,” Maggie got out before she had to stop talking in favor of gulping down mouthfuls of air and trying to forestall the impending panic attack she could feel clawing its way up.

Alex finally fell asleep, her whole body turned toward Maggie, and Maggie found she couldn’t leave her like that, not when she looked so open and vulnerable. So she fished out the tangled mess of her headphones that were still in her bag from the last time she’d thrown them in there to bolt out of the hospital. It wasn’t until she plugged them into the iPod that Alex had teased her about still owning and hit play that she remembered exactly why she had ripped them out the last time, why she had switched over to uncomfortable noise-blocking earplugs and no music. Because there it was again—the same goddam song that drove her away that first week.

> _Sweetheart, would you wake up today?_  
>  _I promise, you would recognize my face._

For a moment Maggie thought she might be sick. She could feel her head spinning and her hands shaking. She managed to make it out into the hall without waking Alex, and she staggered down to the little room labeled, “Visitor’s Center,” as if anyone chose to be here, chose to spend their days camped out in ICU rooms, drinking instant coffee and eating whatever stale granola bars could be found in the dusty vending machine. A choked-down sob finally forced its way up and out of her throat, and soon Maggie found herself on the ground, sobbing without restraint. She threw her iPod as far away from her as she could, and for a moment, she was filled with a vague sense of satisfaction at the sound of it cracking against some solid surface.

After a few minutes, she realized she wasn’t alone anymore. “What?” she asked, her voice hoarse. She wondered if someone had complained about the noise.

“Can I sit with you?”

Maggie pulled her head up enough to confirm that, yes, it was Kara; of course it was Kara. “Why?”

“Well, if you need something to hit, I’m a bit more indestructible than your iPod,” she joked, but her smile looked just as pained as Maggie thought all of her recent attempts had. “I, um, I know that I haven’t…I never came to see how you were after—after everything.”

“It’s fine.” She would’ve turned her away even if she had. She would’ve turned away just about anyone, save, perhaps, for M’gann, who was a little busy saving a planet at the moment.

“Not really. I mean, Alex was never—it wasn’t like she was mad at you. I know it wasn’t that kind of break up.”

“Kara,” Maggie interjected, her head still in her hands. “Can we not—not do…this?”

“Oh, uh, right. I just…no one has said thank you. To you. For being here and doing this.”

“Yeah well…” Maggie shrugged; they hadn’t.

“I know that my saying thank you doesn’t change anything. But for what it’s worth, I mean it. I don’t… I don’t know what I’d do if I lost Alex. And the fact that you’re still willing to make sure she gets better as quickly and easily as possible—it means a lot.”

Maggie could only nod.

At some point she assumed she must have fallen asleep—or at the very least passed out from exhaustion. She woke up in the recliner with a blanket tucked around her and an iPod with a non-cracked screen slipped into her bag.

\---

The next morning Maggie sat with Alex while she ate breakfast and listened as she joked about the hospital’s lack of gross double-toasted sesame bagels for Maggie and beamed because it was real—it was a real, specific detail that she remembered without hesitation, something she just knew deep inside of her was true.

Maggie let Alex hold her hand while the doctors ran her through extensive tests, and she ignored the pitying looks from Kara and Eliza when they arrived and found Alex clutching Maggie close to her.

She let Alex lean on her as they walked around the long hallways, and she forced herself to laugh when Alex said something about being glad they had let her change out of the hospital gown into real clothes because there really was no need for anyone but Maggie to see her butt from the gaping hole in the back of them, and really, why did they make such breezy hospital gowns anyway?

She went down to a bar she’d never been to before that was only a block away from National City General during Alex’s physical therapy session and gulped down two glasses of whiskey on an empty stomach that she tried to cover with a side order of garlic fries. No one said anything when she got back, though J’onn offered to sit with Alex for a little while if Maggie wanted to go home and shower and change. On her way out, Eliza handed her a twenty and asked that she take a cab instead of driving her bike, muttering something about not needing both of them half-dead in the hospital, and Maggie resisted the urge to cry and yell and point out that she wasn’t Eliza’s to claim.

Instead she took the money and hailed a cab and tried to scrub away the memory of Alex’s touch in the tiny shower whose water barely made it past lukewarm if someone else in the building was also using it at the same time.

While she was still in her apartment, Kara texted and asked for her address.

“Why?” Maggie sent back.

“We need to start moving your stuff back into the apartment.”

“The apartment,” like it wasn’t just Alex’s apartment now. Maggie begrudgingly sent her the address, and moments later, Kara swooped through the window with a large duffel bag in her hands. As soon as Maggie gestured to the dresser, Kara was filling the bag with neat stacks of clothing and jetting off with it, only to reappear mere minutes later to fill the bag with shoes, then more clothing. She asked if Maggie would be alright with her coming back with real boxes and a car to get the stacks of books and the kitchenware and any odds and ends that were still around. Maggie shrugged and told her to leave the furniture—none of it was new or nice enough to bother bringing with her—and suggested that she close her eyes tight when she grabbed the shoebox from the top shelf of the bedroom closet.

While she pulled on her boots and a jacket that smelled less like antiseptic and liquor, Kara returned with a stack of cardboard boxes and a small bag. “Before you go…”

“What?”

“I got you a veggie burger.”

“Oh. Thanks,” Maggie mumbled, reaching out for the bag.

“And also, uh, this…” Kara trailed off, opening her palm and looking beyond awkward.

Leaning over, Maggie saw the familiar gleam of metal. “Oh.” Apparently Alex had kept them. She wondered where they had been. Did they go into the little jewelry box she kept on her dresser? Or were they swept into the drawer of the side table where she’d dropped them when she left for the last time?

Kara cleared her throat, moving her hand a little closer.

“Supergirl, you shouldn’t have,” Maggie tried joking.

“Just…before she asks about it.”

Maggie grabbed the rings, shoving one onto her finger and the other in her pocket before storming down the stairs. She couldn’t decide whether she wanted to cry or yell more, though quite frankly, she was pretty fucking done with crying. She’d cried back when it happened, had cried and let herself mourn the death of a relationship she swore was going to be different. But over time, she’d let herself be angry, let herself remember how long Alex had let her go on believing that she was enough. God, she’d survived seeing her father walk away a second time, survived listening to him call her a disgrace a second time, all because she knew that she had someone waiting for her, had a new family to call her own. And that was enough; that was so much more than enough. But apparently she wasn’t. And that—that was what broke her.

She walked the whole way back to the hospital, burger left behind in the apartment and stomach churning, filled with little more than scotch and a few handfuls of fries.

When she took Alex out for her long walk that afternoon, Alex noticed the ring right away and panicked in the way only she could—the way that always circled right back to self-blame. “I—I don’t remember—I swear, I didn’t wear it on missions—but I…”

“No, uh, I, um, I have it,” Maggie stammered, fishing the ring out from her pocket.

“Oh,” Alex sighed, and Maggie watched the tension in her frame dissipate, even as hers was ratcheting up to a degree she didn’t realize was possible as Alex held out her hand and giggled like she had the first night they got their rings when they had taken turns dramatically dropping down to one knee and proposing in increasingly absurd ways until they finally made it back to the apartment and fell into bed together.

“Uh, yeah, here.” Maggie shoved the ring onto Alex’s finger and had to grab hold of the wall as her knees threatened to give out on her.

Seeing the distraught look on Maggie’s face, Alex shuffled over to her and gently wrapped her hands around Maggie’s biceps. “Hey, it’s okay, I’m alive. I’m alive, and I’m not going anywhere. Ride or die, right?”

No, Maggie thought, it wasn’t ride or die. Because Alex had, in fact, gone somewhere, and, yes, she was alive, but, no, as a couple they were not, and soon enough she’d remember that again, and this all felt like the world’s biggest mistake, but she was here now, and it was too late to change anything. So she forced herself to nod, and she wiped away the tears, and she pushed herself up off the wall and got her feet to keep going one in front of the other until she was at Alex’s side again.

They walked in long, slow laps until Alex’s legs were too shaky to keep going any longer—a fact she had apparently chosen to hide until they’d made it all the way to the opposite end of the hospital. “Alex, you need to tell me these things,” Maggie huffed, helping guide her into a seat. This she could do; she could get someone medical help and not feel emotionally invested in a second of it.

“I used to run ten miles in the morning, Maggie! You know this! And now what? Now my muscles feel like they’re jello on lap number two.”

“You didn’t use them at all for a long time. And you’re still doing so much better than someone who wasn’t as fit as you would be if they’d been in a coma for that long.”

“But it’s not good enough!” Alex nearly yelled, her hands curling into fists.

“You are at the point where most people would be after a full month of intensive physical therapy. You are going to get back to where you were, and knowing you, you’ll probably end up even faster and stronger at the end of it. You’re a badass, Danvers, you know that. But even badasses sometimes sit down and ask for help.”

“You…you’ve said that to me before.”

“Yeah, yeah, I have. And I mean it now just as much as I did back then. You’re strong, and you’re gonna get through this. Now I’m gonna go find a doctor, okay?”

“No! Please, just…they’ll stop treating me like I’m capable of doing more then. They won’t push me as hard.”

With a deep sigh, Maggie nodded her head. “Alright, so…you think you’re ready to go again?”

Alex tried to stand up but nearly collapsed. Perhaps three walks plus physical therapy had been a bit of a stretch.

“Okay, hold tight, I’ll be right back.”

Alex could only nod as Maggie jogged down the hallway, peering around a corner before poking her head into an empty room with no patient names scribbled on the whiteboard that hung by the door. A moment later she emerged with one of the collapsible wheelchairs she saw doctors pushing patients around in between rooms. “Your chariot,” Maggie announced, determined to make Alex feel a little less shitty and get her better fast enough that she could get the fuck back to her own life and try to clamber her way out of whatever emotional pit this adventure would surely leave her in.

“So chivalrous,” Alex teased, using the arms of the chair to hoist herself up and get into the wheelchair. She lifted her feet, feeling her muscles burn with the effort of holding them up as Maggie leaned over to flip down the footrest.

“Now just act like we were totally authorized to use this wheelchair, alright?”

“Got it.” And so Alex grinned at everyone she passed and toyed with the hem of her worn Stanford sweatshirt whenever someone gave them a second look.

“Any stops you need to make along the way?” Maggie offered. “I’ll charge you a little extra, but I promise a speedy delivery.”

Laughing, Alex shrugged her shoulders. “Depends…think you can get me out of here for a dessert that isn’t lime jello?”

“Hmm, that might prove challenging—not sure how well this bad boy works on the sidewalks. But we can investigate the cafeteria if you want…”

“You gonna make me get vegan ice cream?”

“If you want dairy, you can have dairy,” Maggie sighed dramatically, spinning around the wheelchair to head in the direction of the elevators.

“My hero.”

Maggie made a noncommittal noise as she called for the elevator and pushed Alex inside, repeatedly jamming the “close door” button before the group of staff could make it in and potentially ask why they were borrowing—definitely not stealing—hospital property.

“Close call there.”

Once they got down to the cafeteria, Maggie wheeled Alex around, letting her browse in the dessert section until she finally selected a Chipwich, insisting that she was supposed to be introducing more diverse foods into her diet, and besides, they used to be her favorite back when she would babysit at the YMCA, and the doctors said sensory memories were great for helping to close up those gaps in her mental timeline. Maggie let it slide, opting not to mention that Alex seemed pretty solid right up until the last few months.

As they headed back up the hospital room, Maggie felt one of Alex’s hands suddenly rest on top of hers on the handle. “Need something?” she asked.

“I just wanted to say thank you,” Alex whispered. “For not…treating me differently.”

“Oh yeah—yeah, it’s—of course.”

“It’s not, not really. Maybe it is for you, but that’s because you’re, well, you.” After a moment, she squeezed Maggie’s hand as best she could manage over her shoulder. “I love you, Maggie.”


	4. Chapter 4

That Friday morning, they finally released Alex from the hospital. Kara and Eliza brought her home, and while Eliza went to the grocery store to pick up as much food as she might need, Kara sat with her and hung out and watched the small doses of television she was allowed before it would start to give her splitting headaches. When Maggie drove from the precinct over to Alex’s apartment—their apartment, as she’d need to call it for the next however many days or weeks or, god forbid, months—she parked in the same spot she always used to park in, and she let herself up in the same elevator she and Alex had once gotten caught making out in, and she fished through her bag for the key that she now had back and let herself into the apartment and tried not to keel over in pain the second she walked through the doorway she’d bawled outside of the last time she was in this building. 

“You’re home!” Alex smiled up at Maggie like she had for so many happy months, and Maggie felt all the air rush out of her chest at once, like that one time back before her aunt had switched her to a new school, when one of the boys Eliza was friends with had tackled her and slammed her into a locker, leaving her wheezing—a fact her teacher didn’t consider an adequate excuse for tardiness. 

“Yep—just, um, I’m gonna shower.”

“Oh, yeah, alright,” Alex nodded, looking slightly disappointed that Maggie didn’t come right over to her, but she could still remember getting home from a long day at work and wanting nothing more than a hot shower.

Maggie found her clothes exactly where they used to be. She wondered if Kara had rearranged the whole apartment or if Alex had never bothered to change things. She wasn’t sure which one would hurt more.

As she stood under the shower with its genuinely hot water, Maggie let herself cry for a lost life for just a minute, let the water wash away all the evidence as she forced herself to be strong again. A part of her wondered whether she could get her captain to call her in for emergencies all weekend. And all month. Really all of forever until Alex got her memories back. 

Eventually, when her skin began to feel raw under the water that she’d probably allowed to get a little too close to scalding, Maggie forced herself out, forced herself to change back into sweatpants and a comfy t-shirt and squeeze the water out of her hair with one of the fluffy navy towels that Alex loved, even though they left blue fuzzies all over her damp skin until they’d been washed at least a dozen times. Alex had called it a good bonding opportunity as Maggie dusted them off her back, though Maggie insisted it was just an easy way for Alex to end up getting a back massage—not that she’d ever really minded having an excuse to touch Alex. 

Figuring there was no use in postponing the inevitable any longer, Maggie carefully hung up her towel, squared her shoulders, and pulled open the door. Before she could make her way into the living room, Kara reached out and led her to the side. “Do you—would it be better if Eliza and I hung out with you for a little longer?”

Maggie was tempted to point out that both options sucked, that she was either going to be stuck alone with her former fiancée or stuck with her former fiancée and her almost family. “No, it’s fine. I know—I can imagine you have plenty to do at the DEO.”

Kara’s face fell, and Maggie swore she glimpsed something that looked so much harder and colder than she’d ever seen on Kara’s features. Then again, it wouldn’t surprise her much if Alex’s near death was what finally pushed her over the limit of her seemingly boundless compassion. “We do. If you need anything, though…”

“Will do.” She already knew she wouldn’t. 

After a long series of goodbyes and insistences that Alex be careful and not push herself too hard and go to the hospital immediately if anything felt even remotely wrong, Maggie finally found herself alone with Alex. “So…”

“Sorry, they’re just worried,” Alex mumbled, picking at the blanket in her lap. 

“No, no, there’s nothing wrong,” Maggie insisted, forcing herself to smile and go sit next to Alex on the couch and act like she couldn’t distinctly remember sitting here just like, listening to Alex promise that she was enough after she’d walked away from her family, from her last real tie to them. “How, um, how are you feeling?”

“Well, I have to say, weeks of sleeping do tend to help with the healing,” Alex joked. Seeing the serious look on Maggie’s face, she dipped her head. “It sucks.”

“I can imagine.”

“I mean, I feel better, I do. And my throat has finally stopped hurting from having a tube down it, and eating is…significantly less shitty these days.”

“That all sounds really good.” Maggie gave Alex what she hoped was an encouraging smile. 

“But…but I’m still not me. I’m still—I’m weak and little things are so hard, and I can’t remember things people tell me sometimes, but I can tell that they’re not pointing it out because they think it’ll depress me or something, but instead it just feels like they’re all whispering behind my back, and god, it’s so much worse.” 

“Hey, they’re only—they don’t know what’s best for you, and I’m sure they’re all trying their hardest.” God knows she was. “But I bet if you told them some of this, they could adapt.” 

Alex shrugged. “It’s not even the worst of it. I’m missing things. I’m missing so much—months, whole portions of my life, of our life. Events and conversations and decisions—gone. Did we ever pick a caterer? I guess we pushed back the wedding date cause we were supposed to be married already, I think,” she rambled, looking increasingly distraught. “And what about the little things, you know, like…did we get all the way caught up on that British baking show you liked? And did Kara, um…she was…she was working on a project—an article. Fuck.”

“It’s okay,” Maggie insisted, tentatively patting Alex’s knee. She forced herself not to pull away when Alex reached out and held her hand. “Look, you have questions, I have answers; it doesn’t have to stay this big black hole.” Alex looked up at Maggie, her eyes glimmering with hope. “Yeah, we picked a caterer. We went with the woman who was a little more expensive but had those really gorgeous petit fours because you said they were tiny and perfect just like, uh, just like me.”

“They were,” Alex sniffed. 

“Yeah, and, um, we decided not to get a big wedding cake—just a little one for the center of the dessert tower. And we went out and found some little cake toppers, and, uh, Kara volunteered to paint them for us so that you were in your DEO uniform, and I had on my big NCPD jacket that you like because we thought they would be a more accurate reflection of reality that way.” 

“That sounds about right. I mean…I don’t really remember it, but I believe it. Like, it feels like something that I could remember.”

“Yeah.”

“And what happened with the wedding?”

So many things and nothing, all at once, Maggie thought. “You’re right, it didn’t happen when we had hoped it would. A lot…a lot of things came up.”

“J’onn said there was a new villain. He called her, um…she’s supposed to destroy worlds.”

“Yeah. She goes by Reign. Apparently there are others.”

“Oh. Do we not know much about them yet?”

“I don’t know.”

Alex cocked her head to the side, and Maggie realized had they been together, she probably would have known. “We, uh, there hasn’t been as much NCPD/DEO cooperation these days. With…how much has been going on.” 

“Oh. This seems like a bad time to stop cooperating.”

“Wow, look at you, finally agreeing that NCPD brings something to the table,” Maggie teased, hoping her laugh didn’t sound as fake to Alex as it did ringing in her ears. 

“Well it brought you into my life, didn’t it?”

Deftly avoiding the question, Maggie shrugged. “I think Scorcher probably gets the credit there.”

“Mm, maybe. So, when are we having our wedding?”

“I don’t know,” Maggie answered. Probably never. No, definitely never—thinking in anything less than the most certain of terms could only ever lead to heartbreak. 

“And what about…um, what other things did we decide?”

“Well, we got into it over whether we should have a band or a DJ. And, uh, we ended up going with a DJ.”

“That makes sense.”

Maggie snorted and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that’s what you said then too.”

“Ah, well, apparently even in the periods of my life I’ve forgotten, I was always very wise.”

Closing her eyes, Maggie breathed deeply and tried to smile. “Anyway. Um, you said something about the Great British Bake Off, right?”

“Oh yeah.”

She could handle that one, even if the reason they’d never finished it was because not too long after they started watching it, they started fighting more, started rehashing the same fucking argument about kids and motherhood and families over and over again until Alex finally said it, finally told Maggie that they couldn’t be together. “We didn’t finish it, so you didn’t forget too much.”

“I guess with the attacks and the wedding planning, it was probably a lot to try to watch a whole new show too, huh?” 

“Something like that.” Maggie pulled at the hem of her shirt. It was old and perfectly soft, and there were a few worn patches that were getting a little threadbare, but it felt more like home than most things these days. “We, uh, I know you’re not supposed to do a lot of screen time—”

“You make me sound like a toddler,” Alex huffed.

Fixing Alex with a stern glare, Maggie continued, “But, as I was saying, we could put on an episode with dinner, see if it helps at all.”

“Think it will?”

“I don’t know. They said sensory memories can help a lot, but with a case like yours that isn’t too major, they also said that time is normally enough on its own too.” God, Maggie needed it to be enough, needed to be done with this charade before it broke her any more. 

“Okay. Kara left some pizza in the fridge, I think.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be…I don’t know, eating healthier? Shouldn’t that help with recovery?”

“I don’t—nevermind.” 

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Alex.”

“Stop!” Alex snapped. “I’m not a fucking child!” 

It was common with TBIs, Maggie repeated to herself. She absolutely should not yell back. Alex didn’t know all the reasons Maggie had for yelling these days. Instead, she pulled herself up and walked over to the kitchen, gathering ingredients for a salad while the oven pre-heated. If they were going to have greasy pizza, there would at least be a vegetable other than the sauce that apparently now counted as one in school lunches. Maggie worked in silence, and Alex didn’t try to break it. 

By the time she returned to the couch with their plates and bowls, Maggie felt a little better, a little less like she was hovering right on the edge of snapping and yelling right back. 

“Do you still want to watch something?” Alex asked, her voice soft. 

“Whatever you feel up to.”

Alex nodded and worked to pull up their show. Maggie watched out of the corner of her eye as Alex’s fingers seemed to freeze and her whole arm trembled, watched as Alex’s free hand curled into a fist and her jaw clenched shut tightly before she managed to get the show page pulled up on the television. Maggie decided the look of satisfaction on Alex’s face meant that she had done the right thing by not offering to help. 

“Where…which one?”

Maggie looked up to see where they left off, only to realize that the latest episode with a little half-filled red progress bar was one she’d actually been watching alone one night when Alex went to Kara’s place after yet another emotionally draining conversation about their future that felt so much more like a fight than a discussion between two people who wanted to spend forever together. 

“Why don’t we skip back a few,” Maggie suggested. “It’s been a while, and I don’t really remember this cast of contestants so well either.” 

They sat on opposite ends of the couch and ate their dinner and watched. The only sounds were those coming from the television and the quiet clinking of their forks in their salad bowls. When they finished eating, Maggie gathered the dishes and washed them in the kitchen, while Alex finally gave up on watching when she began to feel a dull ache creeping in behind her forehead.

“Are you still hungry?” 

“No. Er, no thank you.”

“Okay.” Maggie busied herself with wiping down the counters she could tell Eliza and Kara had cleaned that afternoon. 

After a few more minutes, Alex cleared her throat. “Um, Maggie?”

“Yes?”

“Did, uh, did something happen? Before the coma, I mean.” 

Oh, nothing really. We just called off the wedding and changed the entire course of our lives together. “What do you mean?”

“It’s just, things feel…not the same as I remember. And I don’t know, but it sort of feels like…like you’re mad at me.”

“No, no.”

“Well, if you’re not mad at me, are you…um, are you disappointed? I know that it’s probably not what you wanted—to be here, taking care of me all the time.”

“Hey, no,” Maggie said, her tone firm. “No, absolutely not. Don’t go blaming yourself. It’s not—I’m not mad at you. I am stressed and scared and worried, yes.” She was proud of herself; all three of those words were actually honest. “What’s important is that you’re okay now, that you’re getting better and taking care of yourself.”

“Okay.”

Maggie went back to cleaning the kitchen.

“So, um, is there…um, is there a reason…?” Alex seemed to be running out of oxygen, so Maggie jogged over to the living room and joined Alex on the couch, prompting her to continue. “Is there a reason that you won’t—that you haven’t said I love you?”

“Oh,” Maggie breathed out. She watched the transformation of Alex’s expression the longer she went without responding. She was vulnerable, then nervous, then panicked, in turn, and now she was fast approaching closed off. “No, no reason. I—of course, I do, Alex. I love you. I love you so much it hurts, especially—especially right now.” Maggie was proud of herself for getting through it and only letting her voice crack once. 

“I’m sorry.”

Maggie couldn’t find it within herself to lie and tell Alex that it was fine, that she hadn’t done anything to be sorry for. Instead she settled on holding Alex’s hands and smiling through the tears she could feel welling up in her eyes. “I’m sorry for making you doubt how much I still love you.” 

\---

That night, Alex woke up gasping for air and clawing at the sheets. “Maggie!” she cried out. 

“Danvers! What’s wrong?” Maggie gasped, nearly tripping as she barreled up the four little stairs into the bedroom. 

“I—I can’t—I just…” Alex trailed off. She sounded like she had just run a marathon, and her shirt clung to her, twisted as it was around her torso. Looking more than a little disoriented, Alex patted at the bed and looked around the room as if trying to place herself. “I guess…there was someone in black. And my leg. And it hurt, god, it hurt so much. And then…you weren’t there, and you weren’t here.”

“I’m here, see, right here.”

“But you weren’t…where were you?”

“I was just in the living room.”

“Could you not sleep?”

“No, I just…I thought it would be better to give you the bed, let you get your rest. They say it’s really good for recovery—lots of sleep on a regular schedule.”

“I always sleep better with you next to me.”

Maggie understood that. They hadn’t—not at the beginning. God, back then she remembered their first few nights together, simply lying awake in that bed and wondering how she couldn’t sleep when there was so much room for it and her whole body was exhausted. Eventually they’d gotten better at it, but even then, it wasn’t her bed—or some nights it was, but there was another body in it, another person’s movements and little noises to account for. By the end, though, it only felt right to be able to look up and see Alex right next to her, to be able to scoot just a little closer and pull Alex tight against her. She’d blamed her lack of sleep the first few weeks after the breakup on the fact that she was basically couchsurfing. And then there was the cheap IKEA mattress to blame after that. But when she woke up grasping and reaching for a warm body that wasn’t there every night, eventually she was forced to admit that it didn’t have to do with her mattress; it had to do with the person missing from it. 

“The doctors didn’t say anything about not sleeping in the same bed,” Alex added, her voice soft.

“Right…just, uh, being cautious.” Maggie climbed back into what used to be her side of the bed and tried to ignore the memories that came rushing back of their last time there together. “Do you want to talk about the dream?”

Alex shook her head. “I don’t—I wish I knew what was real. The thing…it’s been in a few of my dreams.”

“Maybe in the morning we can look into it, yeah? I could ask J’onn for some of the case files, find out—see, you know, get a reminder on, all the cases you guys have worked.”

“Okay,” Alex yawned. 

“Do you need some water? I could get you some ice? Maybe turn on the fan?”

“Oh.” Alex seemed only to then realize that she was drenched in sweat. “I…I’m just gonna get a new shirt.”

Maggie nodded and turned her head to the side while Alex changed and ignored the nervous, confused look she got in return.

She didn’t sleep at all that night.

\---

The next morning, after several laps around the block and a bit of light weight training that one of the DEO doctors had cleared Alex for, so long as she did the first few sessions with them, Alex sank down into the couch looking as tired as she used to after long days at work. 

“Do you want something to eat?” Maggie offered, gesturing in the direction of the kitchen. 

“I’m okay.”

“At least have some water,” she insisted, handing over a glass. “I, uh, J’onn came by…while you were at your physical therapy-exercise thing.” 

“Oh?”

“Yeah, I…last night I asked him about getting some of the case files—see if it might help to jog your memory.”

“Thanks, but you—you didn’t have to.”

“If it might help you, I’m happy to do it.” Rather than looking for even a second longer at Alex’s bright smile, Maggie rummaged in the bag J’onn had given her. “He—it’s not everything because, you know, not everything is able to leave the building. But hopefully some of this will help.”

Alex flipped through page after page, every now and then pausing and asking Maggie questions that all too often she couldn’t answer. They spent a fair amount of time on Psi—that one Maggie knew, could remember distinctly, and not only because it had culminated in the beginning of the end of their relationship with some dumb kid who had run into the epicenter of an alien attack—but it didn’t seem to help. Next up was some low-level alien that Maggie had to admit could have been handled by NCPD’s Science Division alone, but she and Alex managed to make a few big decisions about wedding planning the day before. As a reward, they’d kept one another up late into the night, then decided to take off a couple of hours the next morning to get breakfast at the little diner they loved, leaving them just blocks away from the crime scene. And at that point, really, who were they to fight fate’s suggestion that they spend more time together?

There was a note slipped in between files about J’onn’s time on Mars with Kara—a detail that left Alex fuming as she demanded to know why she hadn’t gone up, why two of the most important people in her life were allowed to fling themselves into the middle of an ongoing genocide.

“Well, we, uh, you wouldn’t survive on Mars. And J’onn went because M’gann called him—not on a phone, uh, telepathically, I assume. And then Kara wasn’t about to let him go alone.”

“That sounds like her,” Alex admitted.

“And we had, um”—Maggie cleared her throat—“it was our bridal shower.” 

“What alien attack interrupted that one?” Alex snorted, already flipping through the pages to see what came next. 

“It was…a more human kind of interruption.” Bracing herself, Maggie tried to get a bit of distance from it all, tried to tell it like she was simply filling a coworker in on some details about a case. “It’s a long story, but my father came. He decided it was all a little too much for him and stormed out when we kissed. I went after him.”

“I didn’t come with you?” 

“I, uh, I think you knew that this was one of those things I sort of needed to do on my own.” Alex looked annoyed with herself but motioned for Maggie to continue. “Anyway, he, uh, we talked. And eventually he left, and I went back to our apartment, and then we talked a little, and yeah.” 

“I’m really sorry you had to go through that again, Maggie. And…and again, in telling me.”

Maggie just shrugged and took a deep drink of what she only later realized was definitely Alex’s water. 

They went through a couple more cases until they hit the end of Maggie’s personal knowledge, and she was left flipping through the pages with the same sense of loss and curiosity as Alex. 

“I went to another earth? And fought Nazis? What the fuck happened there?”

“I…um, I don’t know.” 

“I guess you stuck around this earth to keep protecting people here.”

“Oh, yeah, mhm.” Maggie had so many questions about her time on other earths, though, then again, Alex probably did too. She was grateful when Alex continued flipping through the reports.

“Her,” Alex gasped, pointing at photos from Kara’s battle with Reign. “From the dreams. It’s her.” She blanched and seemed to fold in on herself, trembling slightly. 

“Okay, okay, breathe for me. Can you do that?” Maggie counted slowly, finding Alex’s pulse and listening and waiting for it to slow. She wondered if this was the kind of thing that called for a hospital visit. She didn’t think so, but head injuries were so tricky, and god, she would hate herself if she hurt Alex because she just sat there checking her pulse, pretending to be a qualified medical professional. But then it started to slow, and Alex’s cheeks regained a little color, and Maggie felt a little less shitty about her decision to wait. “You’re good. You’re right here with me.”

“If she—if she’s real, does that mean…are all of my dreams real?”

“I don’t know,” Maggie admitted, looking forlornly up at Alex. “I wish I could tell you.”

“Did I…my leg?”

Maggie swallowed heavily. There was an x-ray in the files and some note about a broken bone, so Maggie nodded at Alex and hoped the bone was hers. She watched as Alex examined the files with an intensity she’d once gotten to see firsthand almost daily. 

“Broken tibia,” Alex murmured. “God, you’ve been stuck taking care of me a lot these past few months.”

“No, it’s not, um, it’s not been like that.” Maggie hoped that someone had been there to take care of Alex during all of it. 

“What happened?”

“Well, um, there’s Reign. She’s been…very destructive.” God, that was an understatement. “She beat Kara pretty badly.” It had been all over the news: video footage of Supergirl falling from the sky and smashing apart the concrete below her. She hadn’t gotten up, hadn’t looked like the hero the city knew, the hero the city needed. Instead, she’d looked pale and lifeless. The cameras managed to capture footage of the DEO—not that they were identified as such—sweeping in and clearing out the crowds and loading Supergirl into the back of an unmarked black van. Maggie had been able to pick Alex out of the small swarm of agents right away. Questions were on the front page of every newspaper and magazine: Was Supergirl dead? Had the people who took her body been good or evil? Did Supergirl work with the US government? Rumors had swirled around about others coming to town in the wake of Supergirl’s fall from the heavens: Superman and Wonder Woman. Cat Grant and President Marsdin. The latter suggestion had been too painfully familiar, bringing with it all the memories of the Daxamite invasion, of holding Alex close right up until what might have been the end of the world, of listening to Alex tell her that she wanted to spend forever with her, wanted to make it permanent and official in front of friends and family.

Maggie watched Alex read through reports she knew had been partially scrubbed clean to avoid traumatizing Alex before she was ready, reports devoid of all the sickening details about just how many lives had been lost, how wide the extent of the devastation Reign wrought had really been, how close Kara had come to not making it. “Did we get her?”

“I…I don’t think so.”

“Then I need to get out there, go to the DEO,” Alex rambled, her tone increasingly frantic as she pulled herself up to her feet.

“Hey, no! No, she is the one that put you in that coma. You don’t have your memories, and you’re still getting winded during your long physical therapy sessions. Going out there and getting yourself killed won’t do a goddam thing.” 

Alex looked ready to protest, but eventually she gave in, hanging her head and curling back up on the couch. 

“Alex,” Maggie sighed. “There’s nothing wrong or weak about letting yourself heal.”

“I shouldn’t have gotten hurt in the first place.”

“Everyone got hurt! No one, including the aliens, left these battles unscathed, and hopefully the same is true about Reign. You weren’t the weak link or whatever you’re telling yourself you were.”

Alex didn’t respond, but she stopped protesting, went back to flipping through the pages until she reached the end. “So the only thing I know now that I didn’t before is that some of my nightmares are actually memories.”

“It’s something. It means that the entirety of those couple of months isn’t one big blank. You’re filling in the gaps. It’s progress.”

“It doesn’t feel like progress.”

“I get that, I do.” She’d felt like that most nights when she got into bed and realized she was still miserable and angry and devastated over the breakup. “But incremental progress is still progress. And slowly but surely, it’ll be bigger and bigger until you’re back to where you were.” She wondered if this whole façade was going to fuck Alex up just as much as it was doing to her. 

“I guess.”

“Would I lie to you?” Yes, apparently, about a very huge thing too, if I was told it was what would help you. “I want you to get your memories back just as much as you do.” Maybe even more. Probably even more. “We’ll work together and get them back.” And then I’ll go running back to my shithole of an apartment and hope that Supergirl remembers that she has to carry my stuff back to my place because I’m sure as fuck not dealing with that nightmare again. 

“I guess…” Alex nodded resolutely after a few minutes of quiet and grabbed Maggie’s hand. “With you, with you I can do this. We can do this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If it makes you feel any better, I've begun plotting out the much requested part 2. And there are only 2 chapters of this angsty fic left, which will go up Thursday and Sunday


	5. Chapter 5

On Sunday, Alex asked if she could see photos—not crime scene photos, but photos of them, of their life. Maggie blanched before pulling up the handful she hadn’t been able to bring herself to delete. There were some taken from the bridal shower before it went to shit, and a couple from a party Kara had hosted when she was finally feeling a little closer to her old self, and a group selfie from some girls’ night-in thing they’d done at Kara’s apartment with Lena and some woman named Sam or something equally androgynous and sort of gay sounding. Alex seemed disappointed at how few there were, but she didn’t voice it, instead smiling and asking if Maggie would send the photos to her to look at more later. Maggie wondered how long it would take Alex to delete them once she found out the truth. 

Later that day, Alex asked if they could go down to the waterfront. “It’s one of the cases I really just can’t remember, and…I don’t know, maybe if I start at the beginning and work my way forward, things will come back.”

“Um, okay,” Maggie shrugged. “It’s pretty nice out, but maybe you want to grab a jacket? It’s a little windy down there with the water.”

Alex nodded and fished through the closet until she emerged with a jacket for herself and another for Maggie, which she took with a smile and a quiet, “Thanks.” When Alex reached for the motorcycle helmets, Maggie couldn’t help the shocked bark of laughter. “The hell do you think you’re doing, Danvers?”

“Safety first.”

“Yeah, strapped in with a cloth seatbelt in a nice sedan that I’ll be driving in the right lane only.” 

Alex sighed, but she dropped the helmets and followed Maggie out of the apartment, clinging to her hand a little more tightly when they got into the elevator. Maggie could only assume she remembered that particular night and the hellish hours that followed. 

On the drive over, Maggie let Alex control the radio, watching as her mouth twitched sometimes, as though she remembered hearing some of the songs, but Alex said nothing. She tried to park about where they had parked last time, and she offered a hand to Alex to help get her out of the car and make sure she didn’t go smacking her head into the doorframe like she did on a much too regular basis, so used to simply throwing a leg over her motorcycle and being done with it. 

“So…what happened?”

“Well,” Maggie breathed out, “Lena had a big unveiling event for a statue of Supergirl. That guy—uh, Blood-something, crashed it with missiles. I wonder what it even costs to rent event space in this town…like, do you just rent out your stuff knowing only half of it’s coming back to you in one piece?”

Alex laughed, relaxing a bit as she leaned into Maggie’s side. Maggie wondered if Alex could feel her whole body tense before she forced herself to loosen up. 

“So, what was this attack about?”

“Um, to be honest, I’m not really sure. I think it was something about taxes or some white collar vendetta? They never really gave a definitive answer…”

“So someone blew up a big event over…not much?”

“Pretty much.” They walked around for a little while, and Alex’s brow furrowed slightly as she took it all in. “Well, they say sensory memory is what helps, right? So, um, you were over there on the waterfront side. And then I was here. We were doing surveillance before it started.”

“Should I go over there?”

“Do you—will you be okay? I don’t want you to fall or anything.”

“I’m not one of those old ladies who needs a panic button that repeats, ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,’ until the paramedics come find me.”

Biting back a laugh at the image of Alex sitting on the ground grumbling obscenities and talking about how if she were an EMT, she’d already have been there and they were really lucky she wasn’t dead already, Maggie just nodded. “Alright. We were on comms, but, uh, I guess we could be on phones. Or you can just go, ya know, pretend to surveil. I’m sure all the parents would appreciate having an extra eye on their kids.”

“Kids…” Oh. That was fast, Maggie thought. “There was…one ran into me.”

“Ah. Um, I don’t know, probably. It was crowded.” 

“Wait.” Alex turned back to Maggie. “Were we fighting?”

“A little,” Maggie admitted, rubbing at the back of her neck. “You, um, you were upset about your dad…about his not being able to come to the wedding to walk you down the aisle.”

“Oh.”

“I, uh, I thought we were on a private channel on the comms.” Maggie blushed a faint shade of pink at the memory. “I sort of brought it up…I think I asked you point blank if you even wanted to marry me.”

“Maggie, of course, I do—did then too.”

Fighting back a wave of nausea, Maggie nodded and swallowed her tears and protests. “Um, anyway, the day before we’d had—or we were supposed to have a tasting. We didn’t go. Also didn’t end up going with that caterer, so I guess it was fine in the end. But, uh, I was upset and we hadn’t addressed it at all, even though we’d kind of fought at the bar, uh, the night before.”

“Oh my god, and I thought—I thought you wanted to talk about our sex life on the comms!”

“What?”

“No, no, I remember being totally thrown because it was so not like you, but there—we didn’t, or, well, you didn’t—I couldn’t make you…right, um, anyway.”

“I, uh, yeah, um, that was definitely not what I wanted to talk about in public.” Maggie managed a weak laugh. 

“No, it was about the wedding. And I felt like a shitty person because I was only missing one person, when you… But at the end of the day, it was about marrying you. And as long as you were there with me, I was happy.”

“Right.”

“And then there were missiles, but we—we were okay again before they hit. And I remember being so relieved at that. Because, you know, if I got hurt or—or worse, we were in a good place. You knew that I still loved you, still wanted to marry you more than anything else.”

And Maggie wanted to turn around and bolt and cry in the car until she had to drive Alex back to their sham of a home, but instead Alex was smiling so damn broadly and rushing toward her and wrapping her up in those warm arms that felt so much more like home than any apartment ever had, and then she was kissing her and pulling back too soon to realize that Maggie had completely frozen. “I remember something, Maggie! I remember something that isn’t just work and death. And it’s there, like, maybe little things are missing, but it’s there, and I know I’m not crazy, and are you…is this not a good thing?”

Just breathing felt like a monumental achievement, but Maggie forced herself to pull her lips up and back and nod along with Alex and stutter out something that sounded reassuring as she was pulled back into a hug again. 

Maggie suggested going back to the apartment, but Alex wanted to celebrate the achievement, wanted to go to the alien bar, maybe, see if anything else jogged her memory. Knowing how many people in there already knew they weren’t together and might say something to that effect—and not particularly wanting to go back and pretend like it was still a space she could call hers—Maggie stammered out what she hoped were coherent words about being proud and wanting to celebrate later, but maybe just going home. But then Alex had pulled her lower lip between her teeth and said something about how much she liked the sound of celebrating at home, and Maggie tripped over her own feet and managed to say more words about how actually dinner out sounded amazing, but they should totally go to a nice place, not the alien bar, especially since Alex wasn’t even supposed to be drinking while she recovered anyway. 

Alex was damn near ecstatic all through dinner as she plotted out a list of the places she wanted to try visiting next. There were case locations, which Maggie figured she could handle, but then Alex also wanted to go back to the caterer and the florist and the venue and all of the places that they’d had to call after—well, she suspected Kara made the calls, or maybe Eliza, or literally anyone else who didn’t feel like the whole world was ending just because they were cancelling an order for flowers and petit fours. 

When they got back home, Alex looked up at Maggie with that flirty smile Maggie had gotten so used to when they were together. She used to love seeing it when she got home, knowing exactly what it led to. That night, Maggie cleared her throat and looked away, finding an excuse in the dim glow of the microwave clock. “You should probably start getting ready for bed. They said it’s really important for you to stay on a schedule to help preempt sleeping problems.”

“Um, okay.” Alex nodded, stuffing her hands in her pocket and shuffling into the bedroom to change. Once more, Maggie turned away, taking her time putting away the leftovers and then using the bathroom. By the time she walked back out, Alex was fully dressed again. She didn’t say anything to Maggie as she slipped past her and into the bathroom.

When Alex emerged again, Maggie was propped up on the sofa, shoes placed by the door and coat hung in the closet. She could feel Alex waiting, just knew that if she turned around she’d see one lip pulled between her teeth and her eyes wide and just a little cautious. Pretending to be extremely invested in the article on her phone, Maggie let out an inaudible sigh of relief when she heard the quiet squeak of the second stair up into Alex’s bedroom. 

After several long minutes, Alex cleared her throat. “Um, Maggie?”

“Yes?”

“Are you…do you think you’re coming to bed tonight?”

“Uh, I just, I want to make sure you fall asleep okay first. It’s important that you get your rest.” 

Alex went quiet again, and it lasted as long as it took Maggie to read another article. 

“Um, Maggie?” 

“Yes?”

“Are you mad at me?”

“No,” Maggie sighed. “I’m just a little stressed, is all. Not quite ready for bed.”

“You know, I can think of a lot of ways to relieve that stress…”

“Not tonight, Alex.” Not for the past few months. Not ever again. 

“Is it…do you not, uh, do you not want that because of me?”

The brokenness of Alex’s voice finally got Maggie to turn around. She found Alex, sitting up in bed, worrying her lip between her teeth and picking at the edge of the blanket. She looked so damn small, and Maggie had never quite been able to resist wanting to hold her and protect her and show her that there was still good in this world even when only the worst of it was visible. So she walked over to the bedroom and perched on Alex’s side of the bed. “What do you mean?”

“I mean…I know that I’m not—that right now I’m not exactly the same as I was before. We can’t spar or work or ride our bikes together. We can’t curl up and watch a full-length movie. We can’t go for runs. I can’t even fucking remember this whole chunk of our lives.”

“Alex, stop that. Even if you never fully recovered from this, which I don’t think will be the case because you’re already doing so well, I would still feel the same way about you.” A big conflicted mess of anger and sadness that was getting all confused with softness and tenderness and love as she was forced to remember and relive all the very best that they could be together, had been together. 

“It’s just that you haven’t touched me since. You barely look at me.”

“You just got out of the hospital, Danvers. I’m not gonna risk hurting you.”

“After I was kidnapped and after the other fights…we always did something at least—remind each other that we were still here, still alive. Hell, we got together the night you got shot,” Alex laughed incredulously. “Injuries haven’t normally been a big road block for us.”

“This was—this was bigger,” Maggie insisted.

“It was. And it’s been enough time by now. And I’m doing better.”

“And that’s great! But I’m not going to jeopardize even a moment of that progress.”

“I’ve been cleared for running on a treadmill, Maggie! For lifting and biking too. But you won’t even…you won’t even kiss me.”

“I—”

Alex kept going, though, and Maggie recognized the look of determination on her features. It meant she had something to say, and dammit, she’d finally worked up the courage to say it, and she wasn’t about to let interruptions stop her. 

“You won’t touch me either. When I suggest sex, I can literally see you cringe. I had to ask you to say that you loved me. And, don’t get me wrong, I can see it—everything you’re doing, the way you’re taking care of me, I know that you still love me. I’m not…not that needy. But”—Alex took a deep breath and folded her hands—“I saw, there are studies, you know? About things like, um, intimacy after trauma and injuries. And sometimes partners, uh, they don’t ever get back to what they had, especially if they don’t talk about it.” Alex forced herself to look up at Maggie. “So that—that’s what I’m doing; I’m talking about it. Because we used to…it didn’t used to be hard to get you to touch me, Maggie. And I still want it. I want to be with you. But if something changed for you…”

“Alex,” Maggie gasped, feeling like everything was crumbling around them. “You don’t—without your memories, you don’t know everything. You can’t consent when you don’t know everything.”

“I still know that I love you! I know that I want to marry you and spend my life with you. How is that not enough?”

“It’s just not!” Chest heaving with the effort of not laying it all out in front of Alex, a whole parade of all the reasons why she would not, in fact, want to sleep with Maggie or share casual intimacies with her or sleep in the same bed together anymore, Maggie forced herself to breathe in through her nose, out through her mouth, again and again until she felt slightly less like the room was collapsing in on her. “I”—Maggie sucked in another deep breath, willing her hands to stop shaking—“I am not going to do anything when we don’t both have all the facts. You don’t have all of your memories. I don’t have accurate knowledge about how you’d feel if you did.” At least all of that was true.

“Okay, so we don’t have to do everything, but even when we were bickering and fighting, we still used to sleep together, still used to kiss, still used to just, god, I don’t even know, exist in each other’s orbits. Now it’s like we’re living on two different planets, and every so often I get lucky enough to cross your path.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to make you feel so alone.” She could understand the utter torture of that feeling more than most people, and no matter how angry she was, she would never wish it on Alex. 

“I just”—Alex sniffed and rubbed roughly at the corners of her eyes with her shirt—“I almost died. I know that. No amount of bullshitting and polite phrases from doctors is going to cover up the fact that I almost didn’t wake up again. And yeah, it sucks being weak and feeling a little lost, but there’s another part of me—and I know I haven’t talked about it, so I’m not blaming you for not seeing it—but there’s this other part of me that’s just fucking happy to be here. To be alive. To be with you.”

“And I’m so happy you’re alive too. Honestly, I don’t know what I would have done if you’d died.” Sure, their relationship already had, but she wasn’t sure she’d survive a second grieving process on top of the first. Not yet. Maybe not ever. 

“I know that we almost die a lot, but this one—this one was closer than I’ve come in a little while. It felt even closer than at CADMUS.”

“God, if you’d gotten yourself launched into space, I’d have killed you,” Maggie sniffled.

“I know,” Alex huffed back, shooting a watery smile in Maggie’s direction. “But back then…then we celebrated that we lived. Now it feels like we’re still at a funeral, or like everyone else is, but they’re not telling me who died.” 

“This sounds like it’s about more than just us.” Maggie prayed Alex took the bait and ran with it.

“It’s not—not really. Kara almost died herself, and yeah, she had already been focused on beating Reign, but now that fight has so many other, personal dimensions to it. Of course she’s scared and being more careful than usual. And my mom, well, she’s never really seen firsthand what it means for me to work for the DEO. Suddenly it’s my father all over again, and she’s going to be upset. But you—you’ve seen this world. You’ve lived in it right alongside me. So I need to know, what’s different now?”

Broken, Maggie could only shake her head. “I don’t know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come find me on Tumblr @sapphicscholarwrites, and I'll see you back here on Sunday with the last chapter!
> 
> Also...if it makes anyone feel any better, the first chapter of a part 2 is already written...


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, now that it looks like AO3 is back up, here's the last chapter of Part 1!

While Maggie went to work during the week, Eliza came over and got Alex to and from physical therapy appointments and doctor’s appointments with both hospital and DEO staff and took long walks around the neighborhood and did memory drills with her. J’onn came by a few times, once staying long enough to answer as many questions about Alex’s cases from the period as he could, even taking her out to a crime scene or two and grinning when small details came trickling back to her. It was rarely the whole thing, but it was progress—steady progress—and that was all he’d ever wanted. Kara popped in for lunch and the hour after work every day, staying later whenever the DEO didn’t need her, which unfortunately wasn’t often with so many of their best agents out on forced medical leave or worse. Most days Maggie lingered at the precinct until she could be sure Kara’s typical visits were just about over, only coming back when she absolutely needed to return.

As time went on, though, she found herself questioning why she was so keen on staying at work and avoiding Alex. At first, it had been anger—a deep-rooted frustration at the presumption that she’d be perfectly happy to give up on all of the progress she’d made and the life she’d started to carve out for herself again, only to drop it all and run to Alex’s side to play pretend. But more and more, even with Alex’s confused, hurt glances that she sometimes noticed out of the corner of her eye, Maggie found that she was enjoying herself. It felt—and she hated to admit it—like the first few weeks of their relationship all over again. They were tentative in their movements, shy and uncertain when it came to things like casual touching even though Maggie knew at times she glimpsed a look of hunger and desire and good old-fashioned longing in Alex’s expression and suspected that more than once it had been mirrored right back in her own.

Maggie cooked for Alex as much as she had in the beginning, and Alex was just a little deferential, charming and funny and all of the things that had made Maggie fall so hard so fast the first time around. Only this time it felt even more dangerous. Back then, it was dangerous and scary because Alex had been a fresh out of the closet baby gay with few ideas about what she wanted from a relationship. But now—now Maggie knew what Alex wanted from a relationship, and there was still at least one part of it she couldn’t give to her. Now Maggie knew how it ended, knew how it was always doomed to end.

And it didn’t matter that she felt her heart once more learning to melt at Alex’s soft touches, at the curve of her smile and the way her eyes flashed with excitement when she remembered a new detail or got excited about something or other. It didn’t matter that she could still feel that inexorable pull toward Alex from somewhere deep inside her—somewhere that ached with a longing that was only exacerbated by nights spent sleeping side-by-side, with Alex all too often ending up curled around her, her head tucked into the crook of Maggie’s neck and her warm breath tickling the short hairs there.

None of it mattered because Alex’s memories were coming back. She eventually got back whole cases from days spent with J’onn. She remembered the night before the bridal shower and, a few hours later, the bridal shower itself after Eliza made them the same lasagna she had cooked for dinner that evening. Girls’ night returned to her with a whiff of Lena Luthor’s perfume and an uncorked bottle of the same expensive red wine they’d had then. Maggie swore Alex got it all when she gasped that time, swore she saw some trace of sadness in her expression then, but it was gone again in an instant, and Maggie didn’t know how to ask, didn’t know if she wanted to ask. Because, on the rare night or two when she went out and left Alex with Kara or Eliza while she drowned her sorrows in scotch, she could admit to herself that there was a small, selfish part of her that wanted this to be their new reality, that wanted her life with Alex back.

Of course, as soon as she was sober or even just slightly more clear-headed, she hated herself for wanting it, even for just a few minutes. Alex deserved her memories back, and getting her to a stable enough emotional state to be able to recover them was the whole reason—the only reason—she was there pretending they were still a couple. Her own feelings were simply…collateral damage.

She’d stopped fighting Alex on little things like handholding. When they went out, she knew that Alex’s arm would be slung around her shoulders or their fingers tangled together. And she felt guilt and self-loathing bubbling up in her gut each and every time the gestures made her smile, made her feel happy, loved, complete. When they were in their apartment—Alex’s apartment, she corrected herself each and every time she slipped—she didn’t recoil the instant Alex curled into her side on the couch or tense up when Alex’s arms wrapped around her waist while she was cooking, her chin resting on Maggie’s shoulder and her lips sometimes pressing soft kisses to Maggie’s neck that left butterflies fluttering around in Maggie’s stomach.

She’d drawn a hard line at anything like sex, and she never initiated any kind of touching, but she didn’t push Alex away when she kissed her these days—didn’t ever try to deepen it or do more, but accepted it after seeing Alex look utterly broken too many times at Maggie’s cold shoulder. She’d fled the apartment the one time J’onn was over and Alex had, in the course of telling a story about how one of her memories had come back, leaned over and pecked Maggie on the lips. She couldn’t deal with his knowing looks, couldn’t handle thinking about whatever he might have heard in her thoughts if he listened too closely. So she’d said something about an emergency at the precinct that they all knew she hadn’t gotten a call about and bolted. She’d run and run and run as though the physical effort might exorcise the confusing mess of feelings. Instead she was still just as queasy and anxious, but now she was also winded and exhausted on more than just an emotional level. She didn’t come back until the early hours of the following day. Kara nodded at her and said nothing when Maggie curled up on the couch, leaving Alex alone in the bed that brought back too many memories. She woke up with a blanket on top of her and her shoes and coat removed. Two advil and a glass of water sat on the table in front of her, along with a note explaining that Kara had taken Alex to the DEO for her doctor’s appointment.

One Saturday, Alex begged Maggie to please just take her somewhere related to them, to their wedding. She’d gotten back so many of her memories, but so much of them, of their lives together, was still this huge blank. Maggie wanted to cry and yell and explain that it was because they didn’t have lives that intersected anymore, that Maggie couldn’t tell Alex what she’d been doing in her personal time for much of the past couple of months because she wasn’t there, was as far away as she could possibly hope to be. Eventually she conceded, agreeing to visit one place. She vetoed the caterer, even though Alex protested that sensory memories mattered, and maybe if they just got her to make something they had chosen, it would all come rushing back. They decided on the venue. It had been much less personal than the others, and Maggie doubted anyone who saw them would remember who they were or mention that they had cancelled everything. A small part of her also figured it wouldn’t be the worst thing if Alex were hit with all of her memories at this point. She was doing better now. Surely it wouldn’t be the same devastating blow as it might have been in the beginning when she was already in shock, her body barely healing. Now Alex remembered most things. She could walk and run without getting completely winded. Sure, for safety Maggie still accompanied her on all of the runs and ignored Alex’s remarks about how normally their runs ended with showers together and then just a bit more physical activity all around the apartment, but she was improving.

As it turned out, Alex was fine at the venue. She tilted her head and furrowed her brow and seemed on the verge of something, but it was Maggie who was hit with a rush of memories, Maggie who was overwhelmed by everything that had happened there, everything that could have—should have—happened there. Alex chased her outside into the beautiful gardens that had been half the reason they chose the venue in the first place. She found Maggie sitting on a step, her head between her knees and her whole body shaking as she sobbed, crying for the death of the life they almost had.

“Shit, Maggie, I’m sorry. I didn’t—I didn’t think about how hard it might be for you to come here after I almost—after it almost didn’t happen because I wasn’t—”

“Stop! Just, just stop,” Maggie managed between ragged breaths. “Please.”

Alex stopped, simply sitting next to Maggie in a silence broken only by sobs and gasps for air and shuddering exhales. She rubbed slow circles along Maggie’s back the way she knew calmed her whenever she was upset and waited for Maggie’s hands to find her free one and draw it in the way she always had. For a while it seemed as though it would never come, but when Maggie’s breathing grew a little more even, suddenly there were two shaky hands reaching out and clasping around Alex’s, squeezing her fingers tight enough to almost hurt.

Eventually, when Maggie felt fairly certain that if she stood she wouldn’t collapse back to the ground, she forced herself up, forced herself out the back entrance to the venue, unable to face it another time, unable to face all of the memories of sitting there with Alex and planning where everyone would sit and joking around about the tables they’d assign people to and whether or not they wanted to let Kara play matchmaker with some of the guests and whether or not they wanted to play matchmaker with Kara.

For what felt like the first time since all of this had started, Maggie let Alex take charge. She let Alex hail them a cab, listening to her muttered insistence that Maggie was in no state to drive and they didn’t need to nearly die again. She let Alex give the driver an address, only realizing when they arrived that it hadn’t been to the apartment. She let Alex open the door for her and take her hand and walk her into the little diner by where Maggie’s first apartment had been when she’d moved to National City, fresh from Gotham. She let Alex order all of her favorite dishes, the ones Alex knew always comforted her after a particularly bad day. They’d never made this into one of their “regular” spots; Maggie had wanted it to hold onto that special power it had to cheer her up when it seemed like nothing else would or even could.

They sat and held hands and consumed enough calories to fuel a high school football team. Maggie didn’t even have the energy to try to shush Debbie, one of the regular waitresses, when she commented on how happy she was to see that the two of them had made up again. She suspected that Alex wanted to ask but was grateful when she didn’t.

The next cab ride took them to the park where they used to meet on their lunch breaks on days when they had the time but couldn’t stand the idea of being inside for even a moment longer. They’d grab something fast and easy to eat, then pick up coffees and stroll along the path, arms linked, as they came up with creative stories about the people they passed. Maggie liked to get Alex to name the dogs, hoping she could guide her into less…unique name choices. Instead they were always a little on the odd side: Gertrude and Larry and Harold. At a certain point she’d come to suspect Alex was doing it on purpose, but it was their thing, and she wouldn’t change it for anything.

That day, they walked until they tired, then sat down on one of the park benches and played “guess the life story” with people who walked past. Maggie couldn’t be certain exactly when she started feeling better, but she suspected it was in between the elaborate, Lifetime original movie-worthy story about the knock-knock joke enthusiast with a troubled home life (he told knock-knock jokes now to make up for the pain of knowing that no one ever answered his knocks at his old home anymore), and the more straightforward tale of star-crossed lovers from feuding mob families. And by the time Alex was waxing poetic about the traveling dictionary salesman who’d been forced to adapt with the birth of the internet and now hawked his product as “vintage” to hipsters with too much money, Maggie had to hold herself back to keep from kissing Alex, from trying to show her just how much today meant to her, how good it felt after all of this time to be taken care of and loved. And god, it was love that she felt—and not just from Alex, but for Alex—and she knew it was dangerous, knew it could only ever lead to absolute devastation, but she couldn’t help it any more, couldn’t help but name it, and name it honestly.

Eventually they made it back to the apartment, and Maggie didn’t fight Alex on cuddling that night. For the first time in a long time, she slept soundly, her sleep uninterrupted by nightmares or panic attacks or pangs of guilt.

The next morning, they made breakfast together and then moved over to the couch to enjoy their coffee—Alex’s still decaf to help keep any TBI-induced sleeping problems at bay. As they mused about all of the things they could do that day, Maggie dragged them back to reality by pointing out that the apartment really needed to be cleaned and the laundry done. As much as she insisted that Alex didn’t need to help, she was on her feet and by the hamper before Maggie could drag her back to the couch to rest.

“C’mon,” Alex teased, “if you want me to remember everything, I have to do all the stuff I used to do, and that includes laundry.”

“Fine, fine. I’m not gonna fight you for the privilege,” Maggie laughed.

While Maggie set to work cleaning the kitchen counters and scrubbing the stove, Alex turned on music and began singing loudly along to some pop number Kara loved while she sorted the laundry. Together, the work went quickly enough—even though they’d really let it go for much too long at that point. They paused to belt out “Summer Nights” into their broom microphones and to slow dance around the apartment to “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” and they took short breaks to get snacks, only for Maggie to let out an overly dramatic sigh when a pretzel fell to the floor, scattering a few little salt crystals where she’d just swept.

It was while Maggie was stripping the sheets off of the bed and Alex was sorting through the food in the fridge playing, “What’s that smell?” that Maggie heard it. The songs switched and suddenly there it was:

> _Sweetheart, would you wake up today?_   
>  _I promise, you would recognize my face_   
>  _I wanna show you, how I’ve grown in this place_   
>  _In this place, I’m not alone and I know I’ll be okay._

As she jogged over to switch the songs—no reason for depressing music when that was so clearly not the mood of the day—she caught sight of Alex, frozen halfway between the fridge and the trash. Maggie’s whole body seemed to know what was coming before it even happened, her arms and legs suddenly filled with lead, stopping her dead in her tracks before Alex even managed that one, gasped out little syllable.

“Oh.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So...by general demand, part 2 will happen. That being said, it won't start out happy and fluffy with some sort of magical resolution. Chapter 1 is written, but I'll be traveling tomorrow for a minor medical emergency, then all across the country for work through the end of next week, and won't have time to get a chapter 2 done before I return. Thoughts or preferences: Post a bit of fic sooner but then have a lag before the next chapters start going up, or wait and be able to space the updates regularly? 
> 
> Anyhow, I'm on Tumblr @sapphicscholarwrites in the meantime. Thanks for coming with me on my first angst-centric fic journey!

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on Tumblr @sapphicscholarwrites


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